2016.03.25 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Benjamin Ware, Dialectic of the Ladder: Wittgenstein, the 'Tractatus' and Modernism, Bloomsbury, 2015, 212pp., $112.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781472591401.
Reviewed by Andrew Winer, University of California, Riverside
Late in his illuminating and useful examination of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Benjamin Ware quotes Wittgenstein's assessment of the Viennese house the philosopher designed and built for his sister in 1940, by many lights a modernist masterpiece that Wittgenstein himself deems "the product of a decidedly sensitive ear and good manners, an expression of great understanding (of a culture, etc.)." This pronouncement, and the one that immediately follows and complicates it -- "But primordial life, wild life striving to erupt into the open -- that is lacking. And so you could say it isn't healthy" -- can be seen as emblematic of the sort of two-punch therapeutic wallop with which,. . .